Suchergebnisse

Neoliberalism and the Rise of Central Banks -- Monetarism and the Invention of Monetary Policy -- Hegemonizing Financial Expectations -- Money Markets as Infrastructures of Global Finance and Central Banks -- The Organization of Ignorance: How Central Bankers Abandoned Regulation -- Plumbing Financialization in Vain: Central Banking after 2008.

AbstractI use this introduction to the book forum to situate my work within scholarly discussions of relevance to the readers of Finance and Society, thereby indicating how my work advances the broader field. I also provide a brief synopsis of the book's core findings and offer some ideas on how to think with and beyond the book.

AbstractCentral banking studies continues to consolidate around common foundations, but points of tension and disagreement persist. In this reply, I discuss three such points raised by contributors to this forum. These relate to the concept of infrastructural power, the significance of financial stability policy, and questions of historiography. I also offer some reflections on future directions for the study of central banks.

AbstractSince 2008, we have observed a more prominent role of the state in economic life, with the widespread use of financial tools. Advancing discussions on the financialization of distributional politics, the expansion of financial statecraft as a result of fiscal conflicts, and the fragmentation of state power, this article explores how proliferating financial policies reconfigure the state and its relationship with the economy as well as its democratic foundations. I introduce the concept of financial security states to theorize reactions to mature financialization and its inherent instabilities, which provoke socially structured demands for public stabilization. Leveraging the tradition of fiscal sociology, I work out differences between taxation and welfare systems and those based on financial security. In particular, I show that financial security states exploit value uncertainties to postpone loss-reckoning, are carried by hybrid state-banking institutions, and leverage the states' endogenous power within market-based finance. This article argues that the by-and-large regressive distributional outcomes and fiscal costs of financial policies remain opaque, due to strategic obfuscation, the failure of traditional modes of political mediation, and deficient budgeting procedures.

Joscha Wullweber: Zentralbankkapitalismus - Transformationen des globalen Finanzsystems in Krisenzeiten. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2021. 978-3-518-12747-6

Abstract
Katharina Pistor's argument in The Code of Capital about the constitutive role of legal practice for the creation and distribution of wealth requires contextualization; her claims about the stand-alone role of law in determining the political economy of global capitalism are exaggerated. My first intervention concerns the concept of capital. Capital evidently is not just a legal code, but also constitutes a financial accounting entity that emerges from processes of investment, which are embedded in (economic, social, political) structures that are facilitative of unequal distributions of rewards and risks. Legal coding should be considered as part of such 'capitalization' and as becoming more critical in the contemporary economy, in which capitalization increasingly happens through financial engineering and through capturing rents from 'intangible capital'. Secondly, we can only understand the distributional implications of legal coding if we recognize a) the importance of rent-seeking in secularly stagnating economies and b) the particular class configurations in what Milanovic, B. (2019). Capitalism, alone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press calls 'liberal meritocratic capitalism'. The consolidation of a capital-rich and hard-working upper class in such a capitalist formation (the extreme case being United States) not just indicates a close alliance or overlap between holders of wealth and the professions (fund managers, legal advisers etc.) that serve them. It also indicates that social class structures – the paths of socialization they reproduce; their in-built social sorting mechanisms; their close association with ideologies of legitimate privilege – play a key role in reproducing economic distributional outcomes.

AbstractMonetary policy and financial regulation have been regarded one of the paradigmatic domains where states can reap the benefits of delegating clearly delineated and unequivocal policy tasks to specialized technocrats. This article discusses the negative side‐effects and unintended consequences of particular ways to partition such tasks. The separation between monetary policy formulation, central banks' money market management, and financial supervision has weakened policy makers' capacities to address risks associated with banks' active liability management and to mitigate pro‐cyclical dynamics in money markets. These adverse effects derive from the neglect of liquidity as a regulatory problem in formal task descriptions; from the obstacles to positive coordination between specialized technocrats in the self‐contained domains of monetary policy formulation, implementation, and prudential regulation; and from a dissociation between formal responsibilities, which lie with regulators, and the resources residing in money market divisions – market expertise and influence over counterparties – that are critical to influence bank behavior. I explore these mechanisms with an in‐depth case study of British monetary and financial governance between 1970 and 2007. I posit that we can generalize the respective mechanisms to explore unintended effects of 'agencification' and to contribute to a broader re‐assessment of those organizing principles that have guided the construction of 'new regulatory states'.

AbstractMoney markets are at the heart of financialized capitalism, as those markets that provide the funding liquidity needed for credit creation and leveraged trading. How have these markets evolved, grown, and become critical for larger financial flows? To answer this question, I distinguish an early period of financial globalization marked by regulatory arbitrage, offshoring, deregulation, and informal trading practices from a period of regime-consolidation marked by formal institutionalization. Concentrating on repo markets as the key funding sources for market-based banking, I demonstrate that new institutional arrangements for these markets were initiated by private sector associations, but supported and authorized by public authorities. Bond trader groups codified new contractual arrangements and these were validated via reforms of bankruptcy codes and changes in central banks' policy frameworks in the United States and European Union. Through these modifications and re-articulations in institutional conditions, transactions and large exposures on money markets became routine affairs—for shadow banking actors like money market funds as well as for commercial banks. The article concludes by discussing the continuity of regime-consolidation efforts after the transatlantic financial crisis and hypothesizes that they reveal "neo-patrimonial" features.

Mitchel Y. Abolafia: Stewards of the Market: How the Federal Reserve Made Sense of the Financial Crisis. Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press 2020. 978-0-674-98078-5

Konings successfully mobilizes social theory to demonstrate how various post-Marxist, Polanyian, and Foucauldian analyses fail to make sense of financialization and neoliberal governance as persistent societal formations. In their place he offers an analysis focused on the logic of 'leverage', which he sees as a source of not only private gain but also governmental power. I fully endorse Konings' turn to social theory, and in particular to the work of Niklas Luhmann. But I suggest that, since Konings leaves out Luhmann's broader theory of society, he can neither capture the tight couplings between the economy and politics presupposed in neoliberal governance, nor contextualize this governance as a 'provincial', US-centred project.